Tag: Resident Assistant

Last March, I had breakfast with an old friend. While our conversation rambled, we got onto the subject of our college lives and realized we’d both been resident assistants (RAs) at one point. Somehow, I got around to telling the following story.

All RAs at the University of North Texas were encouraged to customize their wings with a theme and related decorations. My wing (D300) at Bruce Hall was all freshman boys, and because all freshmen were required to live on-campus, some were there against their wishes.

At the time (1995) I was a massive Star Wars fan. So it was natural to dub the wing “The Rebel Alliance“, a name that has mostly stuck since then.

Bruce Hall was also home to the cafeteria that served itself, plus the McConnell Hall and College Inn dorms. Strangely enough, a majority of the cafeteria’s student staff ended up being my residents — serving food, cleaning dishes, busing tables, etc.

Whenever they saw me, they’d stop the serving line so they could fetch me fresh, piping hot servings directly from the kitchen. Say I was sitting at the table for breakfast and I finished off my bowl of Golden Grahams, one of them might come by & refill my bowl. And one year, they declared an “International Hairnet Day” and crowned me King of the Cafeteria.

So the ongoing joke was that I, Matthew McGarity, controlled the food supply for half the on-campus population, and that people had to be really nice to me lest I cut them off. In other words, I was the fucking Godfather.

After today’s breakfast, I went to work at my company’s satellite office. My co-worker Chuck provided me with a helpful printout showing the data model for the application we both utilize. “You can make a copy, if you want, or you can try to scan it,” he said. At this particular office, the scanner was a 3-in-1 printer/fax/scanner machine that was limited in functionality — it could scan to a USB drive, or it could output to your computer, but only if you had a particular client installed on your PC.

Either way, the install process was kludgy enough that Chuck was the only person in the office who bothered to install the PC client. So when people need to scan items, instead of installing the software, they’d just get him to do it.

So Chuck is to office scanning what I was to the Bruce Hall food supply.

Back in the day, before the dark times, before the Empire, I was a troglodyte working to support my university’s residence life system. Yes, ladies and gentleman, I was a resident assistant, living a life of butcher paper signs, happy markers, and 7-day meal plans. It was actually a great job, largely because of the bounty of wealthy personalities which surrounded me. But back in those days, I tended to get easily frustrated and was more prone to anger — often this would cause me problems, but every now and then led to an interesting story like this one.

Every semester, all RAs were mandated to return weeks earlier than the residents so that we might undergo residence life training (or RLT). The training itself wasn’t bad — from time to time we would learn something new. Unfortunately, when it came to training, the wheel was reinvented each semester — the training schedule and presentation were a joint production between the full-time housing staff and the RAs, where the administrators would allow the RAs to help design the training — this was done with the hope that the ownership they take in it will also produce attention and retention. Not a bad plan, but if a particular schedule or presentation method worked well one year, it was scrapped the next. Things would change because they could change, not because they should, if that makes sense. And because of this, I was fried each semester in terms of knowing where to be when.

One morning in training, I was just getting started with the day and heading off for the scheduled 8am breakfast across campus. I’m accompanied by a fellow RA named Rob, who is the kind of guy that when he smiles his eyes disappear amongst great protruding happy cheeks. This was one of the many reasons he was known by the moniker Casper.

As we were heading out, we pass a gaggle of coworkers walking away from the cafeteria to which we were heading! We stop to talk and find out we had misunderstood the schedule: breakfast was actually an hour earlier, and 8am was when training started. Our stomachs were fucked. Rob and I were pissed and hungry, but we went with our fellow RAs for it would be bad to miss training (in other words, our salary would dip from $50 every two weeks to zilch).

My friends and family know that Matthew is an early-rising, grumpy piece of shit when he hasn’t had his first cup o’ morning joe. So before we entered remedial hell, Rob and I decided to make a quick pit stop along the way at the local Mecca, 7-Eleven.

Inside, I grabbed the standard coffee, stuffed an exquisite chocolate éclair into a plastic bag and hopped in line. I found myself mentally aware of just how much time was passing in direct proportion to the lack of speed in the queue leading up to the cash register. And while standing there, I bore witness to a remarkable change in the fabric of the universe. The laws of physics suddenly ceased to exist — either the molecular bonds of my bag cast away any positive-negative attraction to one another, and the mass of my frosted delicacy took a serendipitous climb. In other words, the bag was a piece of crap, had a defect or hole in the bottom, and out came tumbling my once-and-future breakfast.

We were late for training. This made me on edge enough as it is without watching my nourishment tumble away. Tense and in a rush, in frustration I muttered, “Damn it!”

And it was then that I met something of a guardian angel, albeit one clad in a red-and-green polyester vest instead of the traditional white robe. The 7-Eleven checkout lady was an older woman with a pleasant demeanor who heard my cursing. She quickly jumped in to ease the situation by saying, “Oh honey! Don’t you worry about that! In fact, you go get a new one. Everything will be OK — as long as you promise not to swear.”

I was stunned — never once had I married the concepts of “24-hour convenience store” and “social manners” (nowadays, that is probably in the top 100 Google searches). I stared, blinked like a cartoon character, and then silently went back to the pantry to fetch another pastry.

Soon, things would get worse in Ms. Emily Post’s ecosystem, thanks to me. I had another éclair, nested in one hand while I willed the other paw to fish out a new plastic bag from the nearby dispenser. It was a clumsy affair, as the bags were packed quite tight in the box and would not easily come out. I wiggled to and fro, back and forth, with scant success. So I figured that if I gave my bag a swift yank, it would become free quite cleanly.

Yank! Next thing you know, bags are flying throughout the air all over the aisle. At this point, I am now later for training. Later = tenser. Frustration mounted as I grabbed the edge of the counter, and in a textbook moment of angst I boom out my favorite exclamation of frustration at the time, “Fuck me up the ass!”

Just as quickly, I’m then tapped on the shoulder — I turn to see grandma checkout clerk, who then proceeds to slap me and dish out a stern, “If only you were 20 years younger I’d spank you into three days from now” look. I’m frozen in shock. Meanwhile, my silent witness Rob is literally on the floor of the opposite corner laughing his ass off. I assume that he was smiling enough that his eyes again disappeared.

We both go to checkout, and the clerk is giving us some life-is-a-box-of-chocolates crap in an attempt to make us see how insignificant chocolate éclairs are to the whole of life (apparently she isn’t aware of the butterfly effect). We stare, blinking often, soaking it up in silence. Rob and I then leave, and it wasn’t until we were halfway to our training location that we looked at one another and joked, “What the hell just happened'”

Later that day, Rob and I encountered another RA which set us off like you wouldn’t believe. And we became frustrated enough with him to walk out of training altogether that day. And when we were outside again, late for training again, we look at one another and silently agree that the solution to our anger is, “Let’s go talk to ‘mom’.”

We head back to the 7-Eleven — but the lady that helped us was no longer at work that morning. And to be honest, we would never see her again.

Could she have been a guardian angel, trying to curb my habit of over-swearing?